Michelin star restaurants in the UK and Ireland, mapped Where the stars fall

London has more of everything because it has more people, so the fair test is to count per head. Divide each population by its starred restaurants and London has one for every 109,000 people.

The rest of England has one for every 565,000, which gives London about five times as many for its size. Northern Ireland has one for every 964,000.

Ireland comes closest to London. It has slightly fewer people than Scotland and nine more starred restaurants.

For centuries London's food arrived in the middle of the city. Fish came up the river to Billingsgate, in the City. Fruit, vegetables and flowers went to Covent Garden.

The Covent Garden traders left for Nine Elms in 1974, the same year Michelin gave Britain and Ireland their first stars. Billingsgate followed in 1982. The wholesale trade has gone from the centre, but draw a mile around each old market and the guide's restaurants are still crowded inside it.

Michelin files every restaurant under a cuisine. 85 of the 220 are labelled Modern Cuisine, and another 69 carry a British label such as Modern British or Creative British. Together that is seven in every ten.

Outside London the range is narrower still: 93% are modern, British or creative. For most other cooking you need a London postcode. Eight of the nine starred Indian restaurants are in the capital, and so are all five of the Japanese, Chinese and Thai.

38 restaurants hold two or three stars. We traced the chef who leads each one from birthplace to kitchen. London and the rest of England could hardly be more different.

Outside London, all nine in England have an English-born chef. In London it is nine of 21. The other twelve were born in France, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Australia, Brazil, Japan and Canada.

Ireland has 23 starred restaurants and none with three stars. Its five with two are led by chefs born in Sweden, Türkiye, Australia, France and England. None of them was born in Ireland.

Cumbria has half a million people and 13 starred restaurants. That is one for every 40,000 people, against one for every 109,000 in London.

It is more than Wales and Northern Ireland have between them, and one fewer than Scotland, which has about eleven times as many people.

Three are in Ambleside. Two are in Cartmel, a village that grew up around a medieval priory, and one of those is L'Enclume, with three stars.

The 2016 guide had 169 starred restaurants, and the one announced this February had 230. The steady rise hides a constant turnover. Across eleven guides, each has added about 20 restaurants and lost about 14.

What has changed is how they leave. In the guides from 2016 to 2020, Michelin took a star away 57 times and 16 restaurants closed. Since then it has been the other way round: 45 closures, against 28 stars removed.

The turn comes with the 2021 guide, the first to be published after the pandemic began.

A guide starts to go out of date on the day it is published. Ten of the restaurants Michelin starred in February are no longer on its list, most of them because they have closed. This is what happened to each.

Beyond is a creative agency of seven people in Southampton. Our studio is 42 miles from the nearest starred restaurant, Latymer in Bagshot. No big English city is further from one.

So we travel. We work with the chefs behind three of the ten three-star restaurants: The Fat Duck, The Waterside Inn through Maison Roux, and Moor Hall. The three are in two villages, Bray and Aughton, which is why we had the list open in the first place.